convert utf-8 to iso-8859-1 in classic asp

PC-Gram picture PC-Gram · Jul 16, 2013 · Viewed 29.3k times · Source

My site now works purely in UTF-8, but in order to send an SMS using serverXMLHTTP I need to convert my message from UTF-8 til ISO-8859-1 before sending it.

The situation is parallel to this:

a.asp:

<html><head>
<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8">
</head><body>
<form method="post" action="b.asp">
<input type text name="message" value="æøå and ÆØÅ"><br>
<input type=submit>
</body>

and then b.asp

<html><head>
<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=ISO-8859-1">
</head><body>
<%=konvert(request("message"))%><br>
</body>
<%
Function Konvert(sIn)
    Dim oIn : Set oIn = CreateObject("ADODB.Stream")
    oIn.Open
    oIn.CharSet = "UTF-8" 
    oIn.WriteText sIn
    oIn.Position = 0
    oIn.CharSet = "ISO-8859-1"
    Konvert = oIn.ReadText
    oIn.Close
End Function
%>

In this showcase I would expect to see the same string in b.asp as I send i a.asp but what I get i this:

æøå and ÆØÅ

Any ideas?

Answer

user692942 picture user692942 · Jul 16, 2013

Your handling the client side encoding but not the server side

It really depends on your server configuration as to how ASP is handling server requests.

There are two parts to dealing with how IIS encodes responses;

  • What is the physical file (b.asp) encoded as (UTF-8, Windows-1252, Western European (ISO) etc). As long as the processing CodePage matches the ASP file this should not be an issue (personally I prefer to use UTF-8 and in newer IIS versions this is the default).

  • What CodePage does the ASP page expect to be processed as? (<%@ CodePage %> attribute)

You can use the code snippet below in a test page to work out what your server defaults are;

<%
'Check how the server is currently encoding responses.

Call Response.Write(Response.Charset)
Call Response.Write(Response.CodePage)
%>

For the below sample to work correctly b.asp will have to be saved as 65001 (UTF-8), if you're using Visual Studio this can be done using the "Advanced Save Options" dialog (not shown on menu by default has to be added using Customise Menu options).

<%@Language="VBScript" CodePage = 65001 %>
<% 
'IIS should process this page as 65001 (UTF-8), responses should be 
'treated as 28591 (ISO-8859-1).

Response.CharSet = "ISO-8859-1"
Response.CodePage = 28591
%>